I graduated with a master’s degree in the summer of 1945. Immediately afterwards I was mustered. Because of my eyes, I was deferred as having limited fitness. I went to Richmond to wait for my enlistment. The war was over and I was ordered to report in the early fall of 1945, but was not drafted because of high blood pressure. Thus, at the beginning of the fall quarter, I found myself in Chicago with no means to continue my studies, as I had firmly expected to be drafted. I decided to try my luck with the Graduate Faculty for Political and Social Sciences in New York, the so-called University in Exile at the New School for Social Research. The New School was still a fairly new experiment in the field of adult education. It had been founded in 1919 by three distinguished but controversial intellectuals, historian Charles Beard, sociologist Thorstein Veblen, and social scientist Alvin Johnson, and appointed scholars who had already been dismissed from their universities in the course of World War I or during the “Red Scare,” the post-World War I persecution of alleged communists or leftists. The Graduate Faculty of Social and Political Sciences attached to the New School, popularly known as the “University in Exile,” had been established in 1933 after the Nazi seizure of power to enable German and Italian social scientists to continue their academic careers. After the military fall of France, an École Libre des Hautes Études was also attached to the New School.
So I drove to New York, hitchhiking as usual, with no more than twenty dollars in my pocket. My first trip took me to the employment office of the Jewish Federation of Philanthropies, which arranged a temporary position for me. My room with a German Jewish émigré family in Washington Heights cost four dollars a week. Transportation was cheap: five cents for the subway and for the wonderful two-story buses on the 5th Avenue line, which were open at the top.
My second trip was to the New School, where I spoke with the Dean of the Graduate Faculty, Professor Horace Kallen. He was very understanding of my situation and immediately offered me a tuition waiver. Kallen was a great man, the grand old man of the New School, a combative intellectual who, by the way, also worked closely with the great liberal American philosopher John Dewey. Since the early decades of the 20th century, he had tried to reconcile an ethically oriented Judaism with a deep belief in a socially responsible America. In the process, he had also worked hard to bring refugees from Germany into the New School. Almost all of the New School’s events took place in the evening, which was very convenient for me, since I had to earn money during the day.
The year in New York, during which I was not aiming for an academic degree, was undoubtedly the most valuable of my student years….
But the New York year also had its downsides. Only here did I experience serious financial difficulties. My income had always been very modest throughout my student years, but in Chicago regular free meals had eased my subsistence and I possessed enough money to pay my room rent. In addition, I was entitled to medical, though not dental, care, which I probably needed but which remained unaffordable to me. I dressed in discarded army fatigues given to me by a friend or other second-hand items. In New York, however, I had to pay for meals and clothing.
After working in the Jewish Department of the New York Public Library, the Federation of Jewish Philanthropies arranged for me to work part-time as an errand boy at the Jewish Agency for Palestine, the organization that represented the interests of the Jewish population in Palestine before the establishment of the State of Israel. At that time I was still a Zionist, and yet I found my experiences at the Jewish Agency sobering. I had always believed that Jews and Arabs should live together in Palestine, and was shocked at the vehemence of the rejection with which Albert Einstein had been criticized by Jewish Agency staff when he publicly advocated a binational solution.
After that, I worked in the famous Garment Center in midtown Manhattan, where textile factories were concentrated, in which not only the owners but also the workers at that time were predominantly of Jewish origin. There I packed clothes. The work was boring, but quite well paid. I gained insights into the way of life of Jewish workers. Once, when I was sick for a fortnight, I had no money for food and had to borrow it from my parents, which I found very humiliating.
During that year I suffered from a bad depression, which is probably quite common in teenagers, but could not afford to see a therapist. The occasion for the onset of the crisis was the end of my platonic friendship with Nancy.
Source: Wilma and Georg Iggers, Zwei Seiten der Geschichte. Göttingen: Vandenhoeck & Ruprecht, 2002, p. 84ff (translation)